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With Chris Lattner's move to Google and the state of Java it would interesting to see Google embrace Swift and add official support for it to Android.

by m_ke 7y ago

innagadadavida 7y ago
Google will be making making it easier for devs to write portable mobile apps. But it will also need android deva to learn new language.
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
From what I understand they’ve put their chips on Kotlin.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  The fight of single platform gardens?
6700417 7y ago
This seems very unlikely to me. They would need it to interoperate with their existing stack. They chose Kotlin where they reasonably could have chosen Swift and then worked to extend it to work with their existing stack. Judging by what I would argue has been a lukewarm reception to Swift for Tensorflow, I think it would a very hard sell to convince people within Google to support Swift as a first-class language in the rest of their ecosystem. They could for example start by adopting Swift for server-side programming for Google cloud and they seem to be putting no effort into that, at least public-facing effort.
- m_ke 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure they went with Kotlin before Swift was open sourced, but I agree with you that the likelihood of them doing it is very low. Swift for Tensorflow hasn't gotten much traction because the overlap between programmers who know swift and machine learning engineers is super tiny. Making the core language differentiable sounds very promising though .
  - jbverschoor 7y ago
    Swift was released before kotlin
    - m_ke 7y ago
      But wasn't open source till the end of 2015 (https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34 https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34) Kotlin was open sourced around 2012 and people were using it in Android apps before Google officially started supporting it in 2016.
      - 6700417 7y ago
        Kotlin announcement 2017/5/17: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/android-announces-support-for-kotlin.html?m=1 https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/android-an... Swift open source 2015/12/3: https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34 https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34
        lokedhs 7y ago
        That was the official support from Google. Kotlin had been around for a long time before that. I used to write Android applications using it before Google officially supported it.
  - skohan 7y ago
    Swift for Tensorflow also isn't at 1.0 AFAIK and hasn't been deemed "ready for primetime". I think it's going to be hard to get data-scientists using anything other than Python any time soon, but I'm hopeful it will take off at some point, since it's really painful to work with scripting languages once you get used to a decent type system. It's also a super interesting project to follow. The stuff they are doing with automatic differentiation, and the stuff they are talking about with metaprogramming is truly fascinating stuff, with all kinds of applications outside of machine learning. I really hope they manage to get it off the ground.
- endorphone 7y ago
  Just to clarify Google's choice of Kotlin -- the maker of their IDE invented and did all of the heavy lifting with Kotlin, including building the JVM targeting compiler, and the IDE to develop it in (which is the foundation of Android Studio). Adopting Kotlin was very close to free for Android, and was really just rubber stamping what a lot of developers were doing regardless.
  - m_ke 7y ago
    From what I remember Kotlin came to Android before Google embraced Jetbrains and Android Studio.
    - endorphone 7y ago
      May 2013 - https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2013/05/15/intellij-idea-is-the-base-for-android-studio-the-new-ide-for-android-developers/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2013/05/15/intellij-idea-is-... May 2017 - https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654988/google-jet-brains-kotlin-programming-language-android-development-io-2017 https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654988/google-jet-brain... You could use Kotlin for years before Google officially endorsed it...given that Android Studio is made by JetBrains and they made it trivial to use. JetBrains did 100% of the heavy lifting, and Google just conceded eventually.
  - skohan 7y ago
    JetBrains is a plague on mobile development. Their current business model appears to be selling workflows which are totally dependent on their proprietary tooling, and make over-complex monstrosities of mobile applications
- adonese 7y ago
  Are not they use c++/GO for their server side programming?

With Chris Lattner's move to Google and the state of Java it would interesting to see Google embrace Swift and add official support for it to Android.

by m_ke 7y ago

With Chris Lattner's move to Google and the state of Java it would interesting to see Google embrace Swift and add official support for it to Android.

innagadadavida 7y ago

Google will be making making it easier for devs to write portable mobile apps. But it will also need android deva to learn new language.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

From what I understand they’ve put their chips on Kotlin.

lostmsu 7y ago
The fight of single platform gardens?

6700417 7y ago

This seems very unlikely to me. They would need it to interoperate with their existing stack. They chose Kotlin where they reasonably could have chosen Swift and then worked to extend it to work with their existing stack. Judging by what I would argue has been a lukewarm reception to Swift for Tensorflow, I think it would a very hard sell to convince people within Google to support Swift as a first-class language in the rest of their ecosystem. They could for example start by adopting Swift for server-side programming for Google cloud and they seem to be putting no effort into that, at least public-facing effort.

m_ke 7y ago
I'm pretty sure they went with Kotlin before Swift was open sourced, but I agree with you that the likelihood of them doing it is very low. Swift for Tensorflow hasn't gotten much traction because the overlap between programmers who know swift and machine learning engineers is super tiny. Making the core language differentiable sounds very promising though .
- jbverschoor 7y ago
  Swift was released before kotlin
  - m_ke 7y ago
    But wasn't open source till the end of 2015 (https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34 https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34) Kotlin was open sourced around 2012 and people were using it in Android apps before Google officially started supporting it in 2016.
    - 6700417 7y ago
      Kotlin announcement 2017/5/17: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/android-announces-support-for-kotlin.html?m=1 https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/android-an... Swift open source 2015/12/3: https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34 https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=34
      - lokedhs 7y ago
        That was the official support from Google. Kotlin had been around for a long time before that. I used to write Android applications using it before Google officially supported it.
- skohan 7y ago
  Swift for Tensorflow also isn't at 1.0 AFAIK and hasn't been deemed "ready for primetime". I think it's going to be hard to get data-scientists using anything other than Python any time soon, but I'm hopeful it will take off at some point, since it's really painful to work with scripting languages once you get used to a decent type system. It's also a super interesting project to follow. The stuff they are doing with automatic differentiation, and the stuff they are talking about with metaprogramming is truly fascinating stuff, with all kinds of applications outside of machine learning. I really hope they manage to get it off the ground.
endorphone 7y ago
Just to clarify Google's choice of Kotlin -- the maker of their IDE invented and did all of the heavy lifting with Kotlin, including building the JVM targeting compiler, and the IDE to develop it in (which is the foundation of Android Studio). Adopting Kotlin was very close to free for Android, and was really just rubber stamping what a lot of developers were doing regardless.
- m_ke 7y ago
  From what I remember Kotlin came to Android before Google embraced Jetbrains and Android Studio.
  - endorphone 7y ago
    May 2013 - https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2013/05/15/intellij-idea-is-the-base-for-android-studio-the-new-ide-for-android-developers/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2013/05/15/intellij-idea-is-... May 2017 - https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654988/google-jet-brains-kotlin-programming-language-android-development-io-2017 https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654988/google-jet-brain... You could use Kotlin for years before Google officially endorsed it...given that Android Studio is made by JetBrains and they made it trivial to use. JetBrains did 100% of the heavy lifting, and Google just conceded eventually.
- skohan 7y ago
  JetBrains is a plague on mobile development. Their current business model appears to be selling workflows which are totally dependent on their proprietary tooling, and make over-complex monstrosities of mobile applications
adonese 7y ago
Are not they use c++/GO for their server side programming?